This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

In a jailhouse interview, Matthew Deiaco told the Star that it begins with the boyfriend stage where pimps prey on vulnerable girls and pretend to be in love. Deiaco is facing 19 charges, including human trafficking.

Deiaco also has offensive tattoos on his chest. (Melissa Renwick / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Matthew Deiaco has the word "Pimpin" tattooed across his hand. Deiaco says he has played The Game, where pimps prey on vulnerable girls and pretend to be in love in order to lure them into human sex trafficking.
(Melissa Renwick / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

In a jailhouse interview at the Toronto East Detention Centre, Deiaco told the Star he could not talk about his case that is before the courts, except to say that police have their facts wrong.

For example, he says he did not, as police allege, repeatedly punch the victim in the face or throw her in the trunk of a car or hold a gun against her head and say, “I’m going to shoot you. Did you think you could leave me?”

It begins with the boyfriend stage, he says, where pimps prey on vulnerable girls and pretend to be in love.

“Most of these girls, like I said, they’re broken. It’s not hard; you just gotta answer their call,” Deiaco says.

“You get in there, you find the crack; like some are drugs, some are just, they need to hear ‘I love you.’ ”

But, he added, it’s all an illusion because “there is no love in the sex trade.”

Claire, 24, is from a middle-income family in Toronto. She met her pimp at 19 and was trafficked across the GTA for almost two years. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. (Melissa Renwick)

The next stage is the “sale,” where the pimp starts to manipulate the girl into thinking prostitution is an easy way for them to make fast money so they can start to build a future together.

“We need to start a life. . . You tell em’, well, we need to put money away. I’m going to do what I do. See, I’m putting my 50 in, you have to do your 50. So there’s another way, you can have sex with guys, but don’t worry, I’m going to love you. . . At the end of the night you’re home with me,” he says.

“And, she’ll do it.”

Why?

“Cause you just sold her a dream.”

He was only 16 when an older pimp “gave” him two prostitutes in Toronto, a deal known as “changing ownership” in Deiaco’s world.

That was the day he “went from chump change to house money.”

From making $1,000 from every car he stole “to taking $1,000 off of one person a day.”

Over the past 13 years, Deiaco says he has had more than a dozen women working in the sex trade — at one point up to four at a time — from hotels, motels and condos in Toronto.

“Sometimes in a month, if you have four women, you could make $70,000,” he says.

When he was younger, Deiaco says he sold the dream to sex workers and took their money because it’s what he was taught.

He no longer uses love to lure women into the sex trade. “I’m not going to sit here and lie to them and say, ‘Oh, I love you.’ I don’t. I love my money.”

The engaged father of two no longer sees himself as a pimp, but rather a “manager” of escorts.

He said he offers them protection and security, helps them upload their online sex advertisements, drives them to johns’ houses, pays their rent and buys them “anything they need,” from food, tampons and hair dye to condoms and sex toys like dildos or nipple clamps. The deal between Deiaco and his sex workers is usually 60:40 or 70:30, with him pocketing the majority of the cash.

Even though he’s engaged, Deiaco told the Star he still has sex with some of the women he “manages” and when he tells his fiancée, he says, “the first 24 hours are rough.”

But, to Deiaco, sex is business.

“A woman, if she wants to make money off it, she shouldn’t have to go to jail, or somebody that’s helping her. It’s her life. It’s her body. . . Why should anybody be getting into trouble?”

“Some people don’t want a relationship. . . They just want to get what they want and go home, no strings attached. No relationship, no feelings, no fighting — a quick business deal.”

One of Deiaco’s sex workers had a client she would see twice a week who said he was a judge in Toronto, but never disclosed his real name. One night, he picked her up with his robes in the back seat of the car, Deiaco says. Another sex worker was seeing a john regularly who one day called her, said he was a police officer and warned her of a raid on the hotel she was prostituting out of.

“It’s all kinds of people — coppers, newscasters, everything. . . There are even women that call,” he says.

When the Star asked Deiaco if he would ever want his fiancée or daughter to work in the sex trade, he laughed and shook his head.

“I wish I was never introduced to it,” he says.

He has seen pimps lock girls in hotel rooms, beat them, take phone cords out of the wall and disable their Facebook and email accounts.

They do this to “cut them off from the world so that all they have is that person to rely on . . . so they’re dependent on them,” he says.

The girls don’t run because “they have nothing, nobody.”

Deiaco, who grew up in Toronto living with his mother, says his “f--- all bitches” tattoo was targeted at a woman who molested him when he was younger.

“I don’t hate women. That’s not why I do this,” he says.

“I have a mother, I have a sister, I have a daughter. . . I’ve been doing this my whole life. . . It’s hard for me to turn away. We always go back to what we know, right?”

His mom didn’t know he was working in the sex trade until he was charged with human trafficking last year, he says.

“My mom, she doesn’t know that side of life. She’s a good person. . . For sure, I’ve let her down 100 per cent. . . People see me and they see a monster.

“I can’t sit here and cry and be depressed because this is the life I live. I can’t sit here and blame anyone else.”

He has been told that, if convicted, he could face a possible prison sentence of “double digits.”

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com